Style and Sociolinguistic VariationPenelope Eckert, John R. Rickford This study of sociolinguistic variation examines the relation between social identity and ways of speaking. Studying variations in language not only reveals a great deal about speakers' strategies with respect to variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress. The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation. Beginning with an introduction to theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology. |
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accommodation addressee Allan Bell analysis audience design Bell Bell's Cambridge University Press Cardiff Careful speech Casual speech classic sociolinguistic code-switching context contrast conversation Coupland Decision Tree Dell Hymes dialect style differentiation dimension discourse discussion distinction distribution economy English ethnic example factors Finegan and Biber focus formal function gender genre Giles grammar griots Gumperz Howard Giles Hymes identity ideology informants interaction interpretation Labov Language in Society lexical Linguistic Change linguistic features Maori Maori language markers Milroy narrative Oxford Pakeha parameters patterns Perspectives on Register phonological Preston pro-verb pronouns pronunciation quantitative range referee design register variation relation relative clauses Rickford second language acquisition semiotic shift situations social dialect variation social groups social meaning sociolinguistic sociolinguistic variables speakers speech community speech styles spiel status structure style variation style-shifting stylistic variation texts theory tion topic variationist varieties vernacular versus William Labov Wolof words